Project 21631: Buyan-M corvette

GarryB wrote:Well except for the fact that they probably never made that many Granits... Remember there were Vulcans and Kh-22Ms as well...

They were supposed launch all the missiles togather in salvos in coordinated attacks between ships and bombers. So 500-1000 missiles of all types or one type coming at 20 or so ships has the same result.

GarryB wrote:Well except for the fact that they probably never made that many Granits... Remember there were Vulcans and Kh-22Ms as well...

They were supposed launch all the missiles togather in salvos in coordinated attacks between ships and bombers. So 500-1000 missiles of all types or one type coming at 20 or so ships has the same result.

true, but it is also a cost of salvo. This cost must be kept to minimum. i.e. minimal number of missiles to guarantee (i.e. have enough probability) CSG destruction.

It would be an interesting concept to deploy a group of a highly automated modular Buyan style ships version with data links. Each ship would have a different primary role and a small secondary role (layered anti-air, anti ship, anti-submarine, radar) and use these 5-6 small ships together as one team to attack larger more sophisticated ships. I suspect most of these ships would need to combat against superior air power so they need to be able to be very stealthy to approach enemy ships as much as possible and then well defended to be able to fight their way without air cover for their weapons to reach striking range.

Crimea made like one Bykov or something (another ship class Russia is realistically capable of building, ironically because it's made to commercial standard like French ships are)

Giving contracts for ships you can actually build to several shipyards simultaneously is pretty much how you build a Navy, no other way around it

You give it to a shipyard that can specialise in it to be efficient and keep costs down. You don't parse out orders that are made to different standards. The dilapidated yards in Crimea are not efficient at anything which is why it takes them twice as many man hours to produce something.

Crimea made like one Bykov or something (another ship class Russia is realistically capable of building, ironically because it's made to commercial standard like French ships are)

Giving contracts for ships you can actually build to several shipyards simultaneously is pretty much how you build a Navy, no other way around it

You give it to a shipyard that can specialise in it to be efficient and keep costs down. You don't parse out orders that are made to different standards. The dilapidated yards in Crimea are not efficient at anything which is why it takes them twice as many man hours to produce something.

that is the reason why their control was given to more efficient shipyards (More to Pella, Zaliv to zelenodonsk and Sevastopol repair plant to Zvezdochka), and they were given some contracts during their modernisation. They will get there. Otherwise what other way of improving the building capabilities of those shipyards could they have employed?

I mean previously a small ship is dead meat simply because it can be overwhelmed, and also because its small radar and generally small light weapon load make it vulnerable to systems and forces optimised to take on much larger and much more powerfully equipped vessels.

The thing is however, that the new small ships have the same Missile tubes the bigger ships have... they just don't have as many... and while their radar are smaller they share the radar picture of the battle area with all the other ships in the network so their radar view is not worse than any other ship in the group and if you want to extend your radar view then a corvette potentially with a Ka-31 AEW helicopter on board can not just extend the standard ship level radar view (ie with a relatively short radar horizon because of its height above the water and small size and power) but when the helo is airborne it can see low flying and stealthy targets out to extended ranges too... previously a radar picket would be a destroyer and the risk would be significant, but with a corvette with a Ka-31 then the risk is reduced because unlike a corvette from the 1980s it wont be armed with OSA or MANPADS and a 30mm gatling for self defence... it should be better armed than that.

I mean if they are serious about the idea they could make it better if they convert a big tanker ship into a sort of mother ship... it could be able to open the bow and let those smaller ships be carried around inside it for longer range trips like landing craft for a landing ship. Some of their smaller ships have jet boats for landing troops or policing actions at sea, and this could be a scaled up version of the same thing...

Obviously they would be better off with a real AWACS platform, but another option would be an airship as it would not need an aircraft carrier to operate it from... with nuclear power you could have electric motors to move it around and of course hydrogen can be readily converted to water and back with an electrical current and fuel cells, so you can have lifting gas and ballast at your command.

Of course for the longer term a carrier also offers aircraft for escort and identification of targets and threats and can be used for both defence and attack... and are therefore more powerful and more flexible than a slow moving airship... but how could you beat the volume and size space opportunity for a wide variety of radar and communication antenna that an airship would provide. With modern light weight materials like carbon fibre and fibreglass it could be light but strong and fire proof. You could purge the air between the hydrogen bags of normal air and fill it with nitrogen to greatly reduce the fire risk.

I know it sounds off topic, but the article above basically suggests using this corvette as a radar picket boat, so an airship or carrier based AWACS are viable alternatives worth considering... though these corvettes would be available for the role on their own they would be vulnerable and not suitable for long range long duration operations without some sort of mothership IMHO.